Small Minds

A video has gone viral in which a young man pulls up to a DUI checkpoint with his driver's window open only a crack, is greeted in a friendly manner by the officer, and when the officer asks him to roll down the window he refuses to do so. The officer asks how old he is and the driver claims he is not required by law to answer, and when asked to provide an ID the driver claims that the law does not require him to do that either.

You can almost see the officer thinking, “Okay, this guy wants to play macho mas macho.” One thing leads to another and it winds up with his car being searched. This is presented as an example of "police brutality."

The young man is, of course, as dumb as a bag of hammers. What do you gain by refusing to roll down your window? You gain a pissed off policeman, of course, but I don't know many people who would regard that as a desirable objective. He claims he was “asserting his constitutional rights,” but I don’t see anything in the constitution or any of the amendments that says citizens don’t have to roll down their car windows.

And, please note, they do have to produce their driver’s license upon demand of a law enforcement officer if they are driving a car, so when he refused to do that he was not “asserting his constitutional rights,” he was just being an idiot.

But I am actually offended that this guy’s little game of pissing off the policeman is being passed off as “asserting one’s rights,” when all it is in reality is a little ego game played by a spoiled brat. No basic rights were involved here.

Rosa Parks was asserting her rights when she sat in the front of the bus, risking physical harm and perhaps her life to do so, and representing not her ego but the greater cause of human rights.

The 600 marchers who crossed the Edmund Pettus bridge and wound up badly beaten by state troopers were asserting their rights, That was not some ego game, that was part of a years-long struggle to fight for basic rights for their people, and they paid a price.

This video was posted on a liberal discussion group and more than fifty comments were unanimous in cheering the idiot for asserting his rights and condemning the police for brutality. We have become so small in our thinking in this country that we do not even know what “rights” are.